Serialization of SimpleXMLElement

[peipst9lker]

Hi, I'm having trouble serializing an Object of SimpleXMLElement but PHP throws an Exception.

 

Exception: Serialization of 'SimpleXMLElement' is not allowed

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($input);
$ser = serialize($xml);
var_dump($ser);

 

Did some research about serializing objects and I found out that SimpleXMLElement does not have implemented the Serializable-class.

I have a large XML-file and don't want to parse it every time a user enters a certain page, my point is to keep the process as resource-efficient as possible.

Already tried to use json_decode(json_encode($xml)); but then attributes get lost (which are important).

If u have any idea please let me know!

[peipst9lker]

I found a solution myself!

A Class inside my framwork now handles the XML-parsing and writes the values into members.

Now I can just serialize my own class and save the data.

 

@Moderators, please close the thread

[xyph]

Well, your application still has to convert/parse the serialized class, so you might not saving any processing time.

 

You should try both methods, and benchmark. It wouldn't surprise me if storing the modified XML, and then re-parsing it on the next page was actually faster.

[peipst9lker]

Thanks for your reply xyph, benchmark results (using microtime() to get the exact time differences):

 

5000x Parsing xml-file: 1.3933548927307
5000x Unserializing cache-file: 0.56393098831177

 

Parsing serialized data is a lot quicker then parsing XML data, so parsing it once and saving serialized data once  is totally worth it

Of course u can only do it when the XML-file is always the same (which is, in my case).